People For the American Way's "Right Wing Watch" caught the American Family Association search-and-replacing things. (I won't spoil the surprise.)
I found this via salon.com's "War Room" blog, but it's now showing up everywhere.
PZ Myers' take on it is funny — the footnote is quite incisive.
So the Pew Research Center has released their Religious Beliefs & Practices / Social & Political Views: Report 2, titled
Religion in America: Non-Dogmatic, Diverse and Politically Relevant
The thing that's getting headlines is that 57% of Evangelical Christians say that their denomination isn't the One True Path To Heaven.
But the real head-scratching "Hunh?" moment is in the third table, where it lists who believes in a Personal God, an Impersonal Force, and "Other/Don't Know", for a bunch of different groups. These three sets of believers are combined into the "NET Believe in God" column.
The "Atheist" row has 21% "NET Believe in God": 6% believe in a Personal God, 12% in "Impersonal Force", and 3% "Other/Don't Know".
Um. Uh.... People? Just what do you think "atheist" means, anyway? Maybe they thought it meant "eighth-iest"?
Credit goes to my boss for pointing me at this.
In a case that reminds me of Clever Passwords Consider Harmful, I have discovered once again that I am an idiot.
I managed to forget my home PC password, so I had to go fetch my laptop, log into my server, and look in my encrypted password file. This is stupid enough, but when I looked up the password, I discovered that this particular password had been generated from a song.
THE SONG I WAS LISTENING TO.
Sigh.
Clarke's Laws are famous; the first one is
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Today, after a discussion about what could have caused a network outage in one of our various offices (I suggested a localized power problem in the building but my boss thought that couldn't possibly be it — and he was wrong), I propose a new addendum based on Clarke's First Law:
When someone suggests a way something could go wrong with a complex system, they're almost certainly right; when someone responds that that could never happen, they're almost certainly wrong.
Possibly the best political video so far this season.
(I knew he'd done this, but this is far more effective than reading about it. And it's funny! NSFW, but funny!)
(Even funnier, YouTube put a John McCain 2008 ad on the page!)
Here are some reasons why some people are voting Republican.
(Via Dan Savage.)
XKCD does some funning with physicists and other scientists. (Make sure you read the image "alt" tag that you see when you put your cursor over the image.)
Snowball the cockatoo dancing to Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust".
The Spouse and I have been watching this several times a day for several days now. It just gets funnier. The first time watching it, I had to ration it to ten seconds or so every 20 minutes to keep from gasping to death.
Make sure to watch the last 25-30 seconds, even if you skip to it.
So they're doing statue of MLK, and apparently it's disturbing the US Commission of Fine Arts:
A powerful federal arts commission is urging that the sculpture of Martin Luther King Jr. proposed for a memorial on the Tidal Basin be reworked because it is too "confrontational" and reminiscent of political art in totalitarian states.
This is from the commission that approved a Riefenstahlian WW2 memorial.
Synchronization of five (coupled) metronomes. Extremely cool.
(Thanks to my brother-in-law for passing this along to me.)
So. Volume 15 of the Babylon 5 script books just came out, and according to the blurb on the page linked above, it includes
BREAKDOWN OF THE ENTIRE 5-YEAR STORY ARC WITH SINCLAIR
"For over ten years, fans have asked 'What would Babylon 5 have been like had Sinclair stayed?' After we finished the movie, but before we got the series going, WB asked to see a breakdown on this five-year arc thingie. So I wrote a six or seven page, single spaced outline of the entire five years with Sinclair still in place. The document makes for fascinating reading when compared with the series as it developed. Not only that, but the same document has a brief outline for A POTENTIAL BABYLON 5 SEQUEL SERIES, which would have been entitled BABYLON PRIME."
The arc document is insanely different from what actually happened on B5. This is true even for Season 1, and JMS claims in his introduction to it that he wrote it at the beginning of Season 1 (i.e. after "The Gathering").
If you'd rather read this on your own, or just don't want to know, don't read any further, to save yourself from alternate-world B5 spoilers!
The only Big Events that survived basically unchanged are (a) B4 reappearing for a few hours (i.e. "Babylon Squared"); (b) Delenn turning human and getting involved with Sinclair (not Sheridan, who doesn't exist here); and (c) Kosh revealing himself (all angel-ly) to save Sinclair (who is falling from the core shuttle) at the end of Season 2.
The entire Vorlon/Shadow conflict looks different. The flip-side of "Babylon Squared" (what we know as "War Without End") is listed as happening in "Babylon Prime" — the sequel series — and Babylon 4 would be timeshifted to the future, not the past. Some of the plot points that did survive occur much later — it looks like the original arc only covered through what happened in Season 3 or a bit of Season 4 of B5 as it aired. It ends totally differently (and seriously downbeat). There's no "Sleeping in Light" 20-years-later equivalent.
Sinclair's girlfriend/fiancee, Catherine Sakai, does not end up going to Z'ha'dum, as I expected (I had only recently realized that she would have been the equivalent of Anna Sheridan, which is a bit of a "duhh" moment for me; I'm slow) — instead, she gets mind-wiped in some vague fashion (not linked to the Shadows). The Shadows don't get revealed, according to this memo, until Season 4. Season 5 includes the Minbari warrior caste restarting the Earth-Minbari war, and destroying B5 at the end of the season. The end of the season and the series sees Delenn and Sinclair, with their love-child in tow, on the run from basically everyone, including Earth.
!
Then the memo goes into a "Babylon Prime" sequel series, which includes stealing Babylon 4 (which is actually a space cruiser as well as a station, which makes little sense to me), what looks like the Shadow War, and a bunch of other stuff, some of which echoes what ended up in the B5 series.
I actually thought (and maybe still think) that this memo was a joke, it's so insanely different from the show that aired.
Actually — it's not so much the differences per se — it's more how JMS always seemed to imply that he knew exactly how things were going to go, and that they didn't change that much.
E.g., from the Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5's page for "Sleeping in Light":
On GEnie, 11 April 1992:
A few days ago, I sat down with our line producer, John Copeland, and production designer John Iacovelli, and we were talking about the need to move quickly on some stuff, and how painful the process is to have the whole story in your head, already told, really, and then have to make it all over again so we can put it on film. "You think you've got it bad," I noted, "I've already worked out the last scene in the last episode of the last season (#5)...and I've still got to make Movie #1." They called me on it and asked what that scene was. Just to see their reaction, I told them. They looked at me as if I'd suddenly sprouted three heads and feathers. It was worth it. (Happily, they're sworn to secrecy.) It was also good because I think that, even without filling in the beats in between, it gave them a good sense of where the series was going to go.
— according to the "arc memo", the end (of the sequel series) is Sinclair fishing quietly on some uninhabited world. Which doesn't seem all that interesting, really.
And then there's this other quote from the Lurker's Guide page for "Sleeping in Light":
"What this boils down to is... is the ending you envisioned at the start of Babylon 5 the same today as it was then?" For the most part, yeah...it's gotten a bit refined over time, the way it always does the closer you get to it...it's like seeing a mountain from a great distance, then closing in until you can make out the details. But basically, yeah.
Which means that either JMS is way more flexible, mentally, than I ever knew, or he's just put a huge one over on us. I guess we'll see.
Michael Bérubé just posted a very good essay on the candidates and their disability policies. I really miss when he posted things regularly. I miss his snark, especially. Here's a good example from the most recent post:
So I thought I’d write a little something about the candidates’ policy positions on disability, because apparently (a) no one knows that the candidates have policy positions on disability and (b) policy positions on disability are not as important as flag pins. Granted, disability policy never swings an election. And why should it? Unless you yourself have a disability, or unless you know someone with a disability, or unless you’re concerned about things like employment or health care, or unless you might get sick or injured someday, or unless you’re planning on aging, disability policy is irrelevant to you.
After The Onion displayed headlines like "Ringo Next" after George Harrison died, and "Ebert Victorious" after Gene Siskel died, I really did expect them to have a headline like "Gun Pried" after Charlton Heston died.
UPDATE (2008-04-10) Apparently I spoke too soon. Later that day, this showed up. I'd love to claim credit for nudging them to do it, but it's so obvious.
Speaking as a generally introverted person, and someone who really doesn't like IM or high interrupt rates, this seems about right to me.
Wow. The New York Times finally noticed today that financial services CEOs are getting off without much in the way of consequences for messing everything up. Nice of them to catch up to, oh, 1997.
Molly Ivins liked to point out that modern capitalists wanted to "privatize profit and socialize risk". I'm not sure if she coined the phrase (which the NY Times Editorial Board sort of uses, but not quite) but she's the first person I first saw use it.
My Modest Proposal for fixing the insanely eff'd up incentives here ("let's take crazy risks with other people's money -- if we win, we're rich, if we lose, the Fed will bail us out" -- see also moral hazard) is this:
If the Federal Reserve or some Governmental Body bails out any company, then the CEO, President, CFO, Board of Directors, etc. (everyone who is listed in a 10-K filing) immediately forfeits all income, savings, property (which will be put toward paying off shareholders) and must file for personal bankruptcy. Without the help of any lawyers.
I think that'd be a strong dis-incentive to eff up the company and then beg for mercy at the public trough, don't you?
Top Ten Reasons to Watch Battlestar Galactica this Season.
UPDATE: you apparently have to click on the little "camera" icon just above the text of the list in order to see the video. I can't find a URL to do that for you.
Go Boston! Fight the Terrists!
Rush-hour manhunt for terrorists on T revealed as mistake:
Peter Watchorn is a professional harpsichordist, an Australian-born US citizen, and a 21-year resident of Cambridge. He was very surprised last week when he was mistaken for a terrorist.
Sigh.
I am a former physicist, and a big fan of Richard Feynman[1], so I have to link to today's XKCD.
[1] Too bad I couldn't convince The Spouse to name The New Cat "Feynman".
